At the E3 exhibition earlier this year, vivo released the concept phone, APEX, a full-screen, lifting front camera, received considerable attention. At that time, almost all competitors and medias believed that APEX's cutting-edge technology would only be like the standard ending of the concept phone, but it was only a flash in the pan. After all, the brand still dominates the mid-range models such as the X20. Therefore, after the release of NEX in June this year, many people who did not care about the vivo mobile phone also changed the brand impression of Factory after the NEX went public.
In the vivo NEX S review: Display, Soomal believes you have acknowledged the performance of gray-scale, color, brightness and other objective data of it. But behind this comprehensive screen, there are quite a lot of new technologies. Although science and technology are the first productive force, the new technologies do not mean that they are all advantages and benefits when they appear. What will new technology bring to experiences on mobile phones and what is the impact of using habits?

At the beginning of the 21st century, everyone's impression of mobile phones is believed to be keyboard and function phones such as Motorola and Nokia. However, at the time, many mobile phones had only the concept of screen. After the popularity of touching and smart operating systems, the screen of the mobile phone is indeed getting bigger and bigger, and the buttons are getting less and less until it is replaced by the screen navigation keys [mainly referring to the Android camp], and the distance from the screen of the mobile phone to the border is also It is getting narrower. The space outside the front screen of the fuselage is already small. Of course, consumers' appetites are gradually increased: many mobile phones that are compromised in design, cost, production are criticized with some slung words.
Although quite a lot of mobile phone users are also dissatisfied with the trend of notch, there are also some more extreme designs. But the fact tells the manufacturers that putting the front camera, sensor and earpiece into the notch is the most trouble-free, and Google will soon launch the official version of Android 9 to optimize the interface for these notched mobile phones. Before the advent of APEX and NEX, the display panels of various patterns were shaped and even fed a large number of intermediate processing and cutting companies. But to "kill" Notch to achieve a true full screen and not affecting the normal use of mobile phones, it is not a subtraction.
Display Screen: To make a full-vision screen, first of all, the choice on the screen will be the design and final effect of the mobile phone. Although mobile panel manufacturers such as JDI and Sharp are narrowing the thickness on both sides of Sharp AQUOS Crystal, ZTE and Xiaomi phones. It still requires to be thicker upper or lower side to ensure that driver, touch and others IC placement. Of course, there are also clever design to bend the panel to the circuit cable part, try to shorten the "chin" The thickness of this design is called COF [Chip on Film].
The process advantages brought by the flexible OLED panel make it easier to make a full-screen mobile phone. First, the flexible screen can be made into a edge-curved screen, which minimizes the visual thickness of the borders on both sides of the screen, and the excellent viewing angle does not affect brightness and color contrast, which is demonstrated on Samsung's high-end phones after the Galaxy S6 Edge. On the upper and lower sides of the screen, the flexible OLED can bend the panel circuit chip portion to the rear of the mobile phone by 180¡ã bending. This technique is called COP [Chip on Panel]. COP technology was applied to the 2017 Galaxy S8, iPhone X and other models.

Display Screen Earpiece: To remove the notch of the screen, the conventional mobile phone front function components must be changed. The NEX¡¯s light and infrared sensor are placed directly below the screen panel, and of course the X21's in-display screen fingerprint is also inherited. The actual effect is good. However, the earpiece part takes a lot of effort. Some top-borderless phones are placing speaker on the top or back of the phone. This design makes it easy to leak the call-in public. The NEX's earpiece design is unique. It has a miniature flat-panel speaker unit under the panel. This micro unit drives the entire display panel to vibrate, which ensures that the earpiece sound is correctly pointed and avoids front opening.
Lifting front camera: NEX's lifting front camera can be said to be the favorite part of consumers. Its camera adopts micro-motor transmission, which automatically up and down by the system API call through the camera application. To remind you the technology, NEX also dubbed the telescopic process of the camera. In fact, the mechanical sound is only the analog sound of the speaker, not the noise of internal work.
Although for the end consumer, it cost three to thousands of yuan (about 500~700 USD) to buy a cool mobile phone, but in fact the circuit integration inside the mobile phone is very compact. Handheld device adding a complex electric mechanism to carry out various "deformation" is a common routine in science fiction film, but the complicated mechanical design does not meet the production requirements of mobile phones, which requires a large number of failure tests, and the manufacturer's design persistence is also commendable.
Higher integration: Since the current mobile phone requires both a large screen and a battery life, the size of the circuit board is already small, and the space occupied by the electric lifting mechanism greatly reduces the room for the circuit board layout of the mobile phone. It is necessary to improve the efficiency of the use of the space, and the design of the sound quality of the NEX S is in conflict. Independent DAC, op amp and other circuits even need to be much larger than the main processor + storage + memory [CPU, storage and memory chips have been stacked and packaged] and higher signal-to-noise ratio, anti-interference requirements and other requirements have further increased design difficulty. The manufacturer then packages the original independent decoding and op amp buffer into smaller integrated circuits through SiP (System in Package), and the sound quality does not shrink.

Since the screen ratio of most full-screen phones is no longer the standard 16:9 display, the screen aspect ratio of NEX is even higher than that of X21, reaches 2.14:1. Many apps do not take into account these non-standard display ratio Android devices, and insist on displaying them in a 16:9 ratio, which will cause blanks in the bottom of the screen of third-party applications. But these phones offer the ability to adaptively match third-party applications.

Under normal circumstances, after the application is automatically installed, the system will monitor the display mode of the application and automatically process it. When the application runs, it will also prompt in the blank space below, but occasionally there will be unprocessed and locked 16:9 display applications, for example the video player VLC is an Android app that is rarely used by domestic users. Of course, users can manually turn on the adaptation adjustment in the display settings, and for the very common applications such as Alipay and WeChat, the adaptive resolution operation has been implemented, and there is no such problem. The longer screen can display more stock information on the same screen in the financial application APP, which is more convenient. In addition, the number of movies and games that support longer display is also quite a lot, and it seems more enjoyable. Since many action games require virtual button positions on both sides of the screen, the visual range in the middle of the screen can be increased after adapting the wide screen ratio.

Experience Conclusion

In the weeks of experience, I personally am very satisfied with the use of NEX S. Compared to Xplay6, which has been using for two years, the screen color and brightness performance have been significantly improved. Of course, mobile phones that integrate multiple advanced technologies will not be perfect anywhere.
First, for vendors, it is very difficult to use new designs and good sound quality for mobile phone design and production processes. Secondly, the lifting camera mechanism not only squeezes the circuit board, but also brings some weight. The NEX S weighs 199 grams, which is heavier than Xplay 3S [174 grams] and Xplay 6 [178 grams]. This is also because the lifting camera must be protected, vivo official propaganda said that it can withstand the external force of 45KG, the entire drawer is also a metal part. In addition, the front camera section is indeed easy to accumulate dust. Of course, in terms of the lifting mechanism, OPPO has also come up with the flagship model Find X. The overall lifting of the "forehead" also brings another kind of positive reference to the design of the full-screen mobile phone.
On the system side, the design of NEX S is not optimized for round-edged screens, the icons on the left and right sides of the top notification bar are too close to the edge of the screen, which is very cramped, perhaps this will also make some Consumers appreciate the APEX's Founder screen and design. I also hope that manufacturers will improve in the future update of the special-shaped screen optimization Android 9.0. In addition, the NEX S's in-display fingerprint sensor technology uses optical image acquisition and recognition, which is less safe than the common ones.
The competition in the mobile phone market is too fierce, and the way is constantly changing. From the performance to the price, to the sound quality, the camera, etc., the focus of the mobile phone market is constantly changing, then the emergence of NEX S and Find X, Bringing a new idea to the design of mobile phones. If these two high-end mobile phones win market success, will it stimulate other mobile phone manufacturers to return to the era of familiar design and craftsmanship?